Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC (DCI) was created in March 2002, as a joint venture of Disney, Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios. DCI's primary purpose is to establish specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that ensures a uniform and high level of technical performance, reliability and quality control. DCI will also facilitate the development of business plans and strategies to help spur deployment of digital cinema systems in movie theaters.

DCI released the specification for a digital cinema system in mid 2005 and this is based on an image resolution of 2K or 4K using the X'Y'Z' Color Space at 12-bits per color component and employing JPEG2000 compression at up to 250 Mbits/sec in MXF files. The security specified is 128-bit AES for the content with 2048-bit RSA encryption for the keys.

The MXF Interop Initiative is a group of manufacturers of digital cinema equipment along with some of the labs and others who are working in the domain. Some prominent members of this group apart from Real Image Media Technologies are Dolby, Kodak, GDC, Doremi and Technicolor.

The major difference between the DCI specification and the MPEG MXF Interop specification is the compression standard used. The MXF Interop standard is a subset of the DCI standard and uses MPEG-2 compression at 80 Mbits/sec using the YPrPb Color Space in MXF files. The security is identical to that specified by DCI.

Due to the overall complexity of the DCI specification, it is expected that equipment will continue to use the MPEG MXF Interop standard until end 2006 and then transition to using JPEG2000 compression. DCI compliant systems are expected to retain backward compatibility with the MXF Interop spec so that all movies mastered in this format can continue to be played in newer equipment.